By the mid-19th century, several turnpikes had been built through gaps in the Blue Ridge, including the Buchanan and Bedford Turnpike here, present-day Route 43, bringing peddlers, visitors, and at times soldiers to places now seen as vacation sites. On June 15, 1864, Union Gen. David Hunter’s troops crossed the mountains from Buchanan toward Lynchburg, their march hindered by felled trees, large boulders, and diverted streams washing across the road during a 17-mile passage that Pvt. Frank Smith Reader of the 5th West Virginia Cavalry called unimaginably rough. Scouts climbed Sharp Top and claimed that with a good spyglass they could see Richmond, while Reader praised the sweeping landscape as the finest mountain scenery he had ever seen and Hunter’s artillery commander, Capt. Henry A. du Pont, later called the view one of the most superb on the American continent.